4 mar. 2009

Page proofs for my Liverpool book, The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000. This is the first time the book seems real to me, that it will actually appear.

These are my acknowledgments:

Chapter 1 appeared in Hispanic Review (1999) under the title “The Avant-Garde and its Discontents: Aesthetic Conservatism in Recent Spanish Poetry.” I am grateful to Ignacio-Javier López for this accepting this article, and to Guillermo Carnero for circulating it among writers in Spain. Chapter 2 was published in Contemporary Spanish Poetry: The Word and the World, edited by Cecile West-Settle and Sylvia Sherno. Chapter 3 appeared in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Elena Delgado, Jo Labanyi, and an anonymous reviewer were helpful in improving this piece. Chapter 5 appeared in a special issue Diacritics edited by José María Rodríguez-García. Without the help and encouragement of José María and an anonymous reviewer for Diacritics, this chapter would have been much weaker. Claudio Rodríguez-Fer was also helpful to me in giving me background on Valente’s acquaintance with Celan and Heidegger. Chapter 7 first appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. I would like to acknowledge Michael Mudrovic and Randolph Pope for accepting this article, and Akiko Tsuchiya for permission to reprint it here. Randolph also accepted other articles of mine on related topics that did not make it into this book. His generous support of my work over the years is greatly appreciated.

The research for this book was supported, over the years, by the Univer- sity of Kansas General Research Fund, the Hall Center for the Humanities, the Cramer family, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas, and the Grant for Cultural Co-operation between U.S. Universities and the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Without the generous support of these institu- tions, this book could not have been written.

The participants in the Poetics Seminar at the Hall Center for the Humani- ties have also been crucial to my ability to maintain a high level of intellectual stimulation. Thanks is due to Roberta Johnson and Victor Bailey (past and present Directors of the Hall Center respectively), for their on-going support of the Seminar (and of my own research). Ken Irby, Judy Roitman, Stan Lombardo, Van Kelly, Jill Kuhnheim, and Joe Harrington have been the most assiduous participants in the Seminar. My hunger for constant intellectual dialogue has also been fed on a daily basis by an informal network of “Poetry and Poetics Bloggers”: Jordan Davis, Heriberto Yépez, K. Silem Mohammad, Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Jim Behrle, Tim Yu, Josh Corey, Stephanie Young, Henry Gould, Nick Piombino, and about a dozen others.

Various audiences who listened to oral versions of the material presented at several conferences also gave me valuable comments that helped me to clarify my ideas. Also, the students in several Graduate Seminars helped me to remain engaged with this material. Leslie Bayers wrote a paper on Concha García for one of these seminars that stimulated me to develop my ideas on this poet. This book would not have existed without Luis García Montero. Although I doubt he will welcome a book that calls his aesthetic values into question, I must admit that his energy in pursuing his vision of poetry has shaped the recent history of Spanish poetry. If I had not read his eloquent essays outlining the ideological basis for the “poetry of experience,” I would never had begun this project.

Needless to say, none of the individuals or institutions listed above, least of all Luis García Montero, is responsible for any error of fact or judgment in this book. In fact, I have ignored a great deal of excellent advice.

Páginas

Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."